The Instacrobat : Download an Acrobat PDF version of this entryPDFs are created on demand - as soon as you click this link. Please note that the whole process of creating the pdf and downloading it to your computer can take several seconds. Patience is a virtue, even when you have no other choice.

Schools will have to issue a warning before they show pupils Al Gore's controversial film about global warming, a judge indicated yesterday.

And the hero who stood up against his children's indoctrination and brainwashing is Stewart Dimmock, a "lorry driver from Dover with children aged 11 and 14"

Stewart Dimmock said the former U.S. Vice-President's documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, is unfit for schools because it is politically biased and contains serious scientific inaccuracies and 'sentimental mush'.

He wants the video banned after it was distributed with four other short films to 3,500 schools in February. (...)

The outcome marks a partial victory for Mr Dimmock, who had accused the 'New Labour Thought Police' of indoctrinating youngsters by handing out thousands of Climate Change Packs to schools.

Thus I bid you Sir Stewart Dimmock, champion of Truth, and a proud descendant of Saint George, slayer of the dragon to whom younglings were offered as human sacrifice.

David Miliband, who was Environment-Secretary when the school packs were announced, said at the time: 'The debate over the science of climate change is well and truly over.'

The Instacrobat : Download an Acrobat PDF version of this entryPDFs are created on demand - as soon as you click this link. Please note that the whole process of creating the pdf and downloading it to your computer can take several seconds. Patience is a virtue, even when you have no other choice.

James R. Gaine, with a cheery flippancy of the tone, falls for the SarkoShow hook, line and sinker, and conjures the shades of the much vaunted French-American Revolution friendship(1) — a recurring theme for this Paris resident and former managing editor of People, Life and Times magazine, as it would seem — in the embarrassingly naïve America's friend again: France!

Now I can't vouch for the Red Browncoats bashing delivered to post-Tony Britain by Mr. Gaines, as I have not been following the Insular events lately, put I must say I find it rich to see him reprove Britain on her move "from combat to overwatch" in Iraq, and approve France on Sarkozy's vacation in New Hampshire in the same piece.

But maybe that's just me.

The rest of his Andante with Variations in Francophilia Major rings like a béni oui-oui(2) singing his little song at the tune of Sarkozy's relentless posturing and style over substance — "undermine the 35-hours workweek, ting-a-ling-a-ling, put France to work, ding-a-ling-a-ling, Persian carpet-bombing, ding-a-ling ding dong."

Unfortunately, as I listen to Gaines the Jolly Minstrel singing the praise of Prince Sarkozy, all I can hear is the inner me chanting The Song of Jamie the Happy Mouthpiece. A nice one too, though a bit repetitive.(3)

And it only goes louder, as the minstrel climaxes with the following quote:

"I want to tell the American people that the French people are their friends," he [Sarkozy] told The New York Times recently. "We are not simply allies. I am proud of being a friend of the Americans." He admitted that "a small part of the French elite" was anti-American, but added that this "in no way corresponds to what the French people think."

Boy, I sure missed this one(4).

Prince Sarkozy's frustration in the face of the American public not flocking en masse to the Champs-Elysées to wave tiny French paper flags as he drives by — after all the NYPD tee-shirt-ing, Bush buddy-ing and Iranian up-yours-ing he's done — must be growing by the minute.

Because there's no other reason to explain why he'd up the Neo-French pro-American rhetoric from level 1: Cheap Declaration of Intent to level 10: Fairy Tales and Mythical Creatures like that.

That was, as always with the French, just a temporary convergence of interests as far as they were concerned — for the rest, and in the words of Charles Gravier de Vergennes, the French Foreign Minister at the time: "We do not desire that a new republic shall arise (...) [and] become the exclusive mistress of this immense continent (America)". I guess you could say that the French obsession with countering "American hegemony" started even before America was officially born.

For the non Paris resident, non former managing editors of People, Life and Times magazine in the audience, that's French for knee-jerk jerk. No, the repetition is not a typo.

It goes: "Pull the other one mouthpiece, it plays La Marseillaise." (Repeat. And again.)

But then, I try to avoid courting the Grey Lady as much as possible. Unlike Gaine the Jolly Minstrel, apparently.